The St. Johns Herald

A well-brought-up boy learns at a very early age that practical jokes are dangerous things. Sometimes he learns it at his mother's knee, sometimes on his father's face down. Otherwise he receives physical demonstration from a bigger boy. From which it would appear that the youngsters gazetted to the Irrepressibles were not well brought up. At all events, they had the reputation of being the most rowdy crew in the army list. Now, in India, a reputation is only gained by being deserved. And it was in a hill-station that the subalterns of the Irrepressibles reached the loftiest pinnacle of their folly. The affair was hushed up afterward, for the honor of the regiment, as such things should be.

The Irrepressibles were unlucky in their quarters that year. They were fixed on the plains at a time when there was nothing to do, no game, no society, no anything. In a case like that they were thrown back on themselves, and the result was unfortunate. Men's tempers began to give way under the strain, and, from the commanding officer down to the smallest boy capable of beating a drum, there was not one who did not curse the hour he was born at least seven times a day.

The trouble came. It all arose out of the Junior Subaltern going out fishing one day, or out of the fact that he caught nothing. Coming back, however, he must needs run across a cobra, which, with his usual foolhardiness, he duly forked and transferred alive and wriggling into his creel. Thence, on arrival at quarters, it was removed to a perforated box and tenderly fed.

Two of the subalterns began to develop a most astonishing degree of hatred the one for the other. They were two men sufficiently alike in character and capabilities to be either the firmest of friends or the bitterest of enemies. As a matter of choice they were the latter. Jealousy was at the bottom of the trouble, no doubt. In the natural order of things, this little feeling didn't make life any the pleasanter for the rest. At first it was treated as a welcome diversion, and for a time the other youngsters used to take an artistic pleasure in fanning the quarrel, foremost being the Junior Subaltern.

What was originally a variation of the monotony of life, however, soon came to be a nuisance, and the Irrepressibles began to feel very sick. Then they got to wishing that one or both of the men would die. This is not a nice sentiment to entertain toward any man, especially if he is a brother-officer. But, most of all, each of the men wished that the other would go out, and this was even worse.

At last matters came to a head. The two subalterns had a regular row one night after mess. They would have come to blows if it hadn't been for the interference of the older men. There were six men present, all subalterns except one, and it would have been better if they had let the two fight it out then and there. Probably the difficulty might have been settled finally. But peace was patched up for about three days, and then they broke out worse than ever, and said things that half a century ago would have led to pistols next morning. In the meantime, the Junior Subaltern and four other imps of mischief had matured a plan by which they hoped to fix up the matter once for all. And in this plan, naturally enough, the snake took some part.

It was a grim enough practical joke at the best, and they ought to have possessed more sense between the five of them than to think of such a thing. The idea was nothing more or less than to propose to the two men to spend a night together, and with the cobra, in a disused room in quarters. They were to be locked in and left to settle the matter among themselves during the night, and in the morning the rest of the party would release the survivors, if any. Of course there was no thought, even for a moment, of letting loose the cobra in that way, but, as the Junior Subaltern said: "It won't do them any harm to think it out, and perhaps with reflection will come an increase of wisdom."

While the two men were still in the heat of anger, the Junior Subaltern propounded to them his idea of settling their difficulty by means of the snake. He and his confederates looked narrowly at the men, and fancied they blanched slightly at the prospect. This must have been imagination, however, for, as with one breath, they both agreed, and even seemed anxious to have the matter settled. They must have been very mad.

The affair being thus decided, a disused room was chosen as the scene of the ordeal, and was hastily cleared of what furniture was in it. This being done, the two men, who had not changed color during the scene, were stationed at opposite corners of the room, propped up in sitting positions with a clear space between them of something like fifteen feet.

All preliminaries having been arranged, the boy brought in the fatal box and deposited it in the center of the room, in such a manner that the lid should open sideways. Here again his ingenuity came into play. It was obvious that the box must be opened when all except the principals were outside the door. Luckily, the box had a sliding lid, and the Junior Subaltern was able to arrange it so that, by attaching a piece of string, any one standing outside the door would be able to slide back the lid and so release the presumed occupant of the box.

During all these arrangements the five conspirators had felt very serious. They began to realize that it was rather a grim joke they were having, and it is probable that the two men who weren't behind the scenes, who each doubted whether he might be alive in the morning, were less nervous. But then they were still very angry, and hadn't had time yet to think out all the details.

At last all the arrangements had been settled with due exactness. The Junior Subaltern had been an unconscionable time at work. It is probable that he was getting very sick of his hoax, and would have been glad enough to show it up if anyone had given him the lead. After all, he knew that there was an ugly side to the farce, and as his first boyish enthusiasm died away he wanted to throw the thing up. But no one helped him out of it, and for very shame he could scarcely give himself away. Besides, the two principals wouldn't have thanked him.

Nothing more remained to be done. There was solemn enough leave-taking on all sides as the five youngsters filed out of the room and locked the door, leaving the two men in their corners and the box in the center of the room. For a moment or two the five stood in silence out in the passage, the Junior Subaltern holding the end of the string and shaking like an aspen leaf with suppressed excitement. Then he gave it a sharp tug, and they could hear the box-lid sliding back until it dropped to the floor with a slight smack.

It was a hushed and rather conscience-stricken band that dispersed to the various rooms in quarters, and the hours of that night hung heavily. It is a fact that the five youngsters did not average an hour of sleep between them. This was proved by the alacrity with which they all turned out at the first break of dawn, and assembled, shivering and drawn-looking and haggard, ready to go and release their voluntary prisoners.

They were, in fact, so disturbed that they took no notice of the Senior Captain, who, for some reason best known to himself, had turned out, too, and followed them as they trod softly along to the door of the disused room. He was still unnoticed as they reached it, and there made a marked halt; and his curiosity to see their little game prevented him from announcing himself.

They stood for a moment in breathless silence, showing a strange, sudden disinclination to stir. Then, as was the case the night before, the Junior Subaltern took the lead. There was a faint murmur as he turned the key in the lock and stepped boldly into the room the rest following in a crowd. The Senior Captain stood for a moment outside, wondering and trying to make out what it all meant. But a sudden, stifled cry caused him to step quickly after them.

He was a man who had been in several actions. He had seen men killed under all sorts of ghastly circumstances. He had commanded burial parties sent out after the Afghan women had been at their devilish work, and had seen sights that, hardened as he was, had made him feel sick and full of horror. But those scenes were in no way comparable with what met his eyes as he entered the room behind his juniors.

The two men were no longer propped up in the position in which they had been left. Their swollen, distorted bodies were huddled on the floor in attitudes that showed the awful manner in which they had met their doom. But the figures, almost grotesque in the contortions which had attended the last death agony, were as nothing. In each case the face was upturned, livid, with distended cheeks and cracked skin, with flecks of blood oozing from mouth and nose, and with eyes widely open and a fear and horror in them past all description. It was not so much the physical agony as the expression of terror in the fixed faces that rendered these corpses so dreadful to contemplate. Yet the two men, while alive, were as brave, with all their faults, as any men should be.

As he looked in, the Captain was glued to the ground by the nameless horror of that death-stare. He seemed forgetful of his companions, of where he was, all his faculties concentrated on the two huddled masses on the floor. A ghastly incident aroused him. The Junior Subaltern burst into a laugh, faint at first, and then swelling into peal after peal of uproarious mirth. The others stood and watched him.

"Ha! ha!" he shouted, reeling from foot to foot, and holding his shaking sides. "Look at them! Don't they sham well? Aren't they first-rate actors?"

The Senior Captain stepped up to him, and laid a hand roughly on his shoulder. Then the boy turned, and they could all see in his eyes that he was mad. But the touch had quieted him.

"They act beautifully, don't they?" he whispered confidentially to his senior officer. "I wonder when they first found out the joke."

"What do you mean?" asked the other, soothingly.

"Mean?" the maniac replied. "Why, don't you see? I had two boxes just alike, and I put the empty box in here. The snake is still in my own room."

It seemed something like a grim contradiction that, almost at the same moment, a flat, spectacled head reared itself under one of the bodies, and two baleful eyes surveyed the awe-struck group.—San Francisco Argonaut.